By underscoring the frivolity of King Arthur’s court and the indifference to nature represented in the poem’s first two Fitts, the Pearl-poet goes on to establish the Green Knight as an alternative ideal for his aristocratic readers and a model of environmental guardianship.

This article argues that the ‘breton Hope’ passage in Herman of Tournai’s Miracula Sancte Marie Laudunensis (ca. 1142) is not value-neutral as previously supposed; rather, it is a preaching exemplum that participates in the overall didactic function of the work. The episode is not a dependable indicator of local Cornish belief in Arthur’s survival ca. 1113, and it may even be a late accretion written in the context of the early dissemination of Geoffrey’s Historia regum Britannie (ca. 1138). (CB)

PAUL R. ROVANG, Malory's Anatomy of Chivalry: Characterization in the Morte Darthur. Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2015. Pp. xxi, 201. isbn: 978-1-61147-778-8. $75In Malory's Anatomy of Chivalry: Characterization in the Morte Darthur, Paul R. Rovang offers the first book-length study of Malory's art of characterization to be published since Robert Henry Wilson's exemplary 1934 study Characterization in Malory: A Comparison with His Sources. Rovang offers fifteen chapters that discuss sixteen Malorian characters: Arthur, Mark, Gawain, Lancelot, Tristram, Galahad and Perceval, Gareth, Kay, Dinadan, Mordred, Palomides, Guenevere, Isolde, Morgan le Fay, and The Lady of the Lake. Rovang's book differs from both Dorsey Armstrong's 2003 Gender and the Chivalric Community in Malory's Morte d'Arthur and Kenneth Hodges' 2005 Forging Chivalric Communities in Malory's Le Morte Darthur in that it focuses on individual characters rather than groups of characters. It also differs from Beverly Kennedy's 1985 Knighthood in the Morte Darthur in two ways: it examines monarchs and women as well as knights, and it focuses on the development rather than the classification of Malory's characters. Rovang does not engage in source study; instead, he 'examines Malory's thematic characterization of individual rulers, knights, and ladies in keeping with the twin trajectories of his history of the Round Table and contemporary English history' (xv).By presenting a series of separate yet related studies of Malory's characters as either positive or negative examples of or influences on chivalry, Rovang reflects what Le Morte Darthur is: a 'history of the Round Table [containing] a series of self-contained yet closely related tales' that provide readers with models of virtue and vice (xvii). Rovang uses these studies to demonstrate how kings, knights, and female figures contribute to the creation, undermining, and inevitable destruction of the chivalric ideal that Arthur's Round Table fellowship embodies. As he studies an impressively large number of Arthurian characters, the author engages in close-reading of Malory's book and frequent citation of literary criticism on Le Morte Darthur that make this work an insightful and useful introduction for students.Most Malory specialists will readily accept Rovang's conclusion that Malory's Morte Darthur engages readers today because it develops 'flawed, believable, flesh-and-blood characters . . . [that] exemplify different facets and varieties of . …

St. Aelred’s Spiritual Friendship (dated between 1164 and 1167) serves as a framework through which we can read and better understand the interactions among knights on the Grail Quest. Ultimately, spiritual friendship proves not only an ennobling act in Malory, but also a necessary step in achieving the Grail.

Reviewed by: The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro Alan Lupack Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015. Pp. 317. isbn: 978–0–307–27103–7. $26.95. Though set shortly after Arthur’s death, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant is rightly considered an Arthurian novel. Among the characters are an errant Gawain, who remains alive after Arthur’s passing, and a farmer named Axl, who was once a member of Arthur’s retinue, a fact that comes to light only gradually and piecemeal—which is the way the characters and the readers learn much of what is important in the novel. Arthur’s establishing peace between Britons and Saxons is a key plot element, as is a rather impressive spell cast in the recent past by Merlin, who does not appear in the novel. The Buried Giant also involves a quest and a great love, but both of these are different from the quests and courtly love affairs of medieval Arthurian romance. The quest is that of Axl and Beatrice, the central characters, to reach the village of their son; the great love is that between the inseparable and devoted couple. Some of the scenes showing their concern for each other are quite moving. And yet it is revealed at the end of the book that there is something that haunts even their love. The memory of this event is obscured, as are the memories of much else, by a mist that hangs over the land—a mist that is actually the breath of the dragon Querig, enchanted by Merlin intentionally to repress memory. When he was in Arthur’s service, Axl had gained the title of the Knight of Peace because he had brokered a treaty between Britons and Saxons that forbade the slaughter of innocents. On the day of Arthur’s great victory, presumably the Battle of Mount Badon (though it is not named in the novel), Arthur broke that treaty and slaughtered Saxon ‘women, children and elderly’ (212). The memory of this slaughter would have prevented the peace that Arthur sought for Britain; and so Merlin cast the [End Page 118] spell that caused the dragon’s breath to erase memory. Gawain, who says that he had been tasked by Arthur to slay Querig, actually protects the dragon and thus the peace. Another of the main characters of the novel is an Anglo-Saxon warrior named Wistan, who, in a clear allusion to Beowulf, kills an ogre and brings his ‘shoulder and upper arm’ (67) as a trophy and as proof of his exploit. He is also on a mission to slay the dragon Querig, which he ultimately does. This allusion to Beowulf underscores the fact that, in the novel, the Anglo-Saxon world of Wistan and the British world of Arthur come into conflict. Wistan, who is somehow immune to the memory loss caused by the dragon’s breath, slays the dragon so that all will remember the massacre of innocent Saxons. Memories, which have been buried, are like the giant of the title, who though ‘once well buried, now stirs’ and will ‘surely’ rise again (297). Ishiguro suggests that memories, especially painful memories, must resurface. Wistan slays Querig, but even if he had failed to do so, the aging dragon’s breath would have ended soon and the memory of the slaughter would have reemerged. Even Gawain, as he defends the dragon, realizes that she would last just ‘another season or two’; but he has the illusory hope that that ‘may be long enough for old wounds to heal forever, and an eternal peace to hold among us’ (286). Yet Ishiguro seems to imply that it is a futile wish that the past can be forgotten or that the past can be healed by time without being confronted. The future of Britain is represented by Edwin, a young boy who was saved by Wistan and befriended by Beatrice and Axl. The couple hope that Edwin will remember their friendship, but the Saxon warrior elicits from Edwin a promise to hate all Britons, even those who have shown him kindness. For Ishiguro, this view of painful memories of the past affects...

This article traces the development of the legend of Arthur’s return from Avalon from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s inception of the motif to its early reception history, exploring its relationship to Welsh and Breton prophetic traditions and the impact of Avalon on subsequent English and French understandings of a constructed genre of pan-British political prophecy.

Reviewed by: Medieval Literature: Criticism and Debate ed. by Holly A. Crocker and D. Vance Smith Meg Roland holly a. crocker and d. vance smith, eds., Medieval Literature: Criticism and Debate. London and New York: Routledge, 2014. Pp. 534. isbn: 978–0–415–66789–6 (cloth), 978–0–415–66790–6 (pbk). $125 (cloth), $55.95 (pbk). Medieval Literature: Criticism and Debate is a powerful collection for long-standing professionals and graduate students alike. Unlike most essay collections consisting entirely of new scholarly work, Medieval Literature: Criticism and Debate (MLCD) provides a rich contextual slice of medieval studies over the past twenty five years. While most essays were first published after the millennium, a few notable essays from the 1990’s are also included (David Lawton’s iconic essay, for example, ‘Dullness and the Fifteenth Century,’ first published in 1987), signaling the way in which these earlier essays have continued to exert significant influence in the field of medieval literary studies well into the 21st century. There are essays here from David Wallace, Bruce Holsinger, Patricia Clare Ingram, Christine Chism, the hardworking duo of Laurie Finke and Martin Shichtman, well-known to Arthurian scholars, and many other fine scholars of medieval literature. Re-published essays from esteemed colleagues are worth reading for the first or fourth time. The resulting collection is akin to aggregating the best plenary lectures of Kalamazoo, Leeds, The New Chaucer Society, The International Arthurian Society, and the MLA all into one volume. For graduate students, the volume is essential reading as a means of entering the conversations that have shaped and are currently shaping the field of late-medieval studies, and each chapter offers suggestions for further reading that includes other important essays published in the last 25 years. The majority of the volume, however, consists of newly-commissioned work across a provocative range of constructs, grouped together to spark critical dialogue. Editors Holly A. Crocker and D. Vance Smith, both contributors to the volume, attribute their inspiration for their methodological approach to medieval debate poetry. As the editors assert, ‘Scholastic method … is a mode of critique, a testing of the possibility of what is being asserted, and an analysis of how it is thought about’ (4). In this spirit, MLCD does not have one theoretical perspective but provides, instead, a spirited (rather than ‘bloodless’ [5]) celebration of polyphonic voices and debate. The volume is thus organized ‘around a series of counter-posed topics’ with the goal of enacting ‘the capacious dynamism that is present from the outset of the medieval disputation’ (3). Essays are grouped so as to enhance dialectical exchange within conceptual categories such as ‘Form and History,’ ‘Belief and Thought,’ ‘Gender and Sexuality,’ ‘Memory and Matter,’ ‘Nation and Language,’ ‘Time and Place,’ ‘Science and Embodiment,’ ‘Period and Politics,’ and ‘Desire and Performance.’ Within these groupings are essays on chronicles, ballads, romance, Chaucer, religious texts, conduct books, the Pearl Poet, the Ancrene Wisse, Hoccleve, fabliau, Mandeville’s Travels, Malory, Christian-Jewish relations, and more. Something, in other words, for nearly every medievalist, both to challenge long-held perspectives and to open fresh ideas through juxtaposition and interpretive tension. The collection provides [End Page 146] an invitation to read outside one’s usual journals or conference networks and to open new channels of thought. While impossible to delineate the multiple arguments of an array of thirty-eight essays, the introductory essay alone inspired this reviewer to reorganize a Fall 2014 Survey of British Literature class to include The Floure and the Leafe and to foreground the role of literary debate. Two essays from the ‘Time and Place’ sub-group—Jennifer Summit’s essay from 2000, ‘Topography as Historiography: Petrarch, Chaucer, and the Making of Rome,’ and David Wallace’s 2006 essay ‘Imperium, Commerce, and National Crusade: The Romance of Malory’s Morte’—provided a provocative intervention in a chapter revision with which I was engaged regarding Malory’s Roman War episode. For Arthurian scholars, Wallace’s essay on Malory, along with Corinne Saunder’s essay ‘Christianity and Middle English Romance,’ Tison Pugh’s and Angela Jane Weisl’s essay ‘Movie Madness: Five (or Six) Ways of Viewing an Anachronism,’ and Laurie Finke’s and...

SUSANNA FEIN AND MICHAEL JOHNSTON, eds., Robert Thornton and His Books: Essays on the Lincoln and London Thornton Manuscripts. Woodbridge, Suffolk and Rochester, New York: York Medieval Press, 2014. Pp. 325. isbn: 978-1-90315-351-2. $99.A glance at the title of this volume might bring one to question what advantage might be gained from a collection so intensely focused on a single Yorkshire scribe who produced only two books, given that London has already been established to be the dominant culture of late medieval England's professional book trade. Yet it is in Thornton's very idiosyncrasy and his failure to 'fit any of the larger patterns in which most historians of English book production have been interested' (2), Michael Johnston argues, that his two books-Lincoln, Cathedral Library MS 91 and London, British Library MS Add. 31,042-matter.Robert Thornton and His Books is the first book in over twenty-five years to focus exclusively on Robert Thornton (c.1397-c.1465), the amateur scribe and compiler whose extraordinary books-the second-most substantial collection of Middle English romances-preserve an extraordinary quantity of literature which may well otherwise have been lost to oblivion, including the Alliterative Morte Arthure. This long-overdue collection brings together for the first time a fully realized account of Thornton's activity and its relationship to fifteenth-century English book production, Yorkshire social and literary networks, and lay vernacular devotional and reading habits.This volume serves the dual purpose of acting as a rallying point for current scholars and as a staging ground for future scholarly work by marrying the interests of codicological and paleographical analysis with literary criticism. Its first three articles address the manuscripts' physical characteristics. Susanna Fein's contribution offers a comprehensive account of the contents of Thornton's manuscripts that includes the location of scribal signatures, references to other manuscript witnesses, and the citation of scholarly editions. George Keiser follows this with an extended and lively review of Thornton scholarship, peppered throughout with new insights into his milieu, life, scribal practice, and texts. In addition to its comprehensive catalogue of the manuscripts' structure and decoration, Joel Fredell's article situates Thornton's books in their fifteenth-century Yorkshire context, using the decorative features of the manuscripts to complicate our assumptions that Thornton's copying and compilation processes may be reduced to matters of convenience, and arguing that Thornton 'imposed his own organization' on them (120).No collection discussing Thornton would be complete without mentioning its most famous text, the Alliterative Morte Arthure. This volume performs admirably on these grounds. In their provocative reassessment of the language of the Morte, Ralph Hanna and Thorlac Turville-Petre argue persuasively for the need to produce a new edition-one that incorporates the evidence from both the Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English and from Malory, who 'had access to a text of the poem that was at some points more accurate and more complete than Thornton's' (141). …

King Arthur in the Twenty-First Century:Kaamelott, BBC’s Merlin, and Starz’s Camelot Tara Foster and Jon Sherman While cinematic re-imaginings of medieval Arthurian narratives have received much attention from scholars, television adaptations—with an equally impressive spectrum of co-opted Arthurian characters, motifs and plots—have not seemed to generate similar academic interest. The past ten years have seen two long-running and successful series based on the legends of King Arthur—Alexandre Astier’s Kaamelott (2005–2009) and the BBC’s Merlin (2008–2012)—as well as Starz’s prematurely cancelled Camelot (2011). This special issue explores these three programs from a number of angles. In the first two essays, Tara Foster and Cédric Briand both analyze the much-adored French Kaamelott. Foster demonstrates that in his portrayal of Arthur’s court, Astier deliberately creates something akin to the multicultural world of his contemporary spectators, permitting them to make a more direct connection between the show’s fictional world and their own. Briand examines the conflict between Lancelot and his king, a conflict that underscores the dysfunctional nature of the court and is the source for both the humor and the tragedy of the series. In the next two essays, the female figures in the BBC’s Merlin and Starz’s Camelot become the focus. Cindy Mediavilla traces the progression of Morgan le Fay from a figure that is trivialized or caricatured—complete with outlandish costumes and mannerisms—to one that is fully developed and humanized, while Jennifer Edwards argues that despite paying lip service to feminist ideas about women’s empowerment, both shows offer narratives that ultimately reinscribe patriarchal values. In the final three essays, Jon Sherman, Erin Chandler, and David Tollerton focus on the BBC’s Merlin. Sherman highlights the dynamic tensions created through audience background knowledge and viewer expectations clashing with the series’ Arthurian innovations. Chandler shows that Merlin co-opts not only superficial elements of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but also its underlying structure to examine the program’s central themes of family and [End Page 3] familial conflict. Tollerton points to the central role of Uther’s war on magic as a reflection of the concerns of Merlin’s target audience. Although each of the three series has come to an end, Astier’s output is ongoing: an eighth companion graphic novel was released in 2014, and he has planned both a movie trilogy and a collection of short stories to link Kaamelott to the trilogy. Despite the ever-expanding corpus of Arthurian television adaptations, the number of scholarly treatments of these adaptations is decidedly smaller than those of Arthurian films. The essays in this special issue seek to redress the imbalance between scholarship on Arthurian film and Arthurian television. Norris J. Lacy’s comment that ‘we should all be devoting more attention to texts other than those that have long occupied—and obviously still occupy—the center of the canon’ could just as easily be applied to film, the center of the audiovisual Arthurian canon, versus television, which still occupies a marginal position in that canon.1 His suggestion that ‘productive study of the lesser-known texts, medieval or modern, enables us both to reevaluate those texts and also develop a more subtle appreciation of the “masterpieces” against which we inevitably measure them’ concisely summarizes the purpose of this special issue.2 Its editors hope that these essays not only contribute to the available research on Arthurian television, but that they also inspire and encourage others to continue to examine the growing number of incarnations of Camelot on the small screen. As the popularity of Kaamelott, Merlin, and Camelot prove, the Arthurian legends remain as productive as ever, suggesting a promising future for the once and future king. Tara Foster and Jon Sherman Northern Michigan University notes 1. Norris J. Lacy, ‘Arthurian Research in a New Century: Prospects and Projects,’ in New Directions in Arthurian Studies, ed. Alan Lupack, Arthurian Studies LI (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002), p. 16 [pp. 1–20]. 2. Lacy, ‘Arthurian Research in a New Century,’ pp. 16–17. [End Page 4] Copyright © 2015 Scriptorium Press

Although recent fiction has portrayed Morgan le Fay much more sympathetically, on television she has remained, for the most part, an evil caricature. The depictions of Morgan on Starz’s Camelot and BBC1’s Merlin stand out as being among the most fully realized versions of her character in any medium. (CM)